Didn't these other guys (Eberhard? Straubel? Maybe Tarpenning?) found Tesla, or at least the started some kind of electric car company is a garage before Musk came along?
At the very least, Musk is the Jobs and some other dudes or dudettes are the Woz of Tesla? But hasn't Musk glommed on to the limelight; is he the Stalin of Tesla?
There must be a lot of really smart people at Tesla and SpaceX, but I guess Elon Musk is the public face and the "visionary." I am getting to think that Tesla needs to move on from Tesla, and I am told that is already the case at SpaceX with Gwynne Shotwell running that place?
A board of directors is the Capitalist version of the Politburo, or the Politburo in a Communist government is like a corporate board of directors.
Actually, there is the Central Committee to which the Politburo reports, but you get the idea.
In a political democracy, which neither a Communist government or a Capitalist corporation are, you don't have such a thing, but you have various checks-and-balances such as an independent judiciary or a bicameral (two-house) legislature or three-branch legislature-executive-judicial system.
A family member served on the board of directors of a shopping mall. The board hired a mall manager who had a more-than-full-time job actually running the place, but the board would meet once a month to discuss "how the mall was doing" -- were there rental vacancies or did new tenants replace the ones who left or were kicked out? Is the nail salon underreporting their income and underpaying the profit-based portion of their rent?
I too wonder about having the CEO also serve as Chairman-of-the-Board. In Catholic parishes, the parish priest typically serves as Chairman of the Parish Council whereas is Protestant churches, the pastor is regarded more as a church employee rather than having special status under Apostolic Succession? Protestant churches can hire and fire their pastor whereas a Catholic parish pretty much has to work with the priest assigned to them by the bishop? So how much independence does a Catholic Parish Council have with the priest sitting right there and what Catholic-in-good-enough-standing-to-get-elected-to-Council is going to disrespect their priest?
I also wondered how the Politburo functioned under Stalin -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- members of this Communist version of a Board of Directors starting ending up dead when they disagreed?
So even corporate boards can have varying degrees of independence or lack thereof from the guy-in-charge? So let's just hope the new Tesla board members stay healthy?
What does unfit for military service even mean? This sounds like some excuse offered to a draft board to get excused?
"Sir, I am unable to do 5 chin-ups/pull-ups/whatever-kind-of-qualifying-callisthenic-to-qualify-for-military-service." "Too bad, son, you will have to stay home and wallow in shame to not be at the front with your friends, living out your natural lifespan with your limbs intact."
Do I need to run the dryer at 5 PM? No, but what if I run it at 7 PM?
The time-of-day plans I have seen offered by the local power company would require you to run it after 11 PM.
I have seen no cost benefit to switching to a time-of-day plan without radical, not minor, lifestyle changes.
Is my power company not sincere of wanting people to switch? Do they think some customers will switch because they cannot do simple calculations? Or are the lifestyle changes to make a meaningful difference with respect to the mismatch between solar and when electricity demanded deeper than simply postponing running your dryer a couple hours into the evening?
The Golden Rule of marketing is to price a good or a service at what each individual customers is willing to pay, and yes, the "options racket" is a way of charging customers different amounts for nearly the same thing.
The airlines have gone into this in a big way, not only with the system for offering cheaper tickets for advanced purchase, inconvenient times, or having to change in Atlanta, but also the upgrade fees for checked bags, extra legroom, or being the first person to exit the plane in case it catches fire after landing.
Oracle is moving towards segmenting the market for the Java JDK/JRE, where it remains free if you are on the treadmill to use only the latest version with security updates (and no more 32-bit X86 either), otherwise you pay. And there are no posted prices as you are supposed to call Oracle to be asked, "How much are you willing to spend?"
You could say that the 15K for the basket of options is "pure profit", but how do you know that the 30K for the baseline car is offering the car "at cost"? Running a car company, you basically are paying salaries, hourly wages, fringes and money to suppliers of parts, your factory and insurance utilities, and then you have money coming in from the sale of cars along with income streams from your captive leasing and financing subsidiary for customers not paying in cash up front. If the money coming in exceeds the money going out, you are "cash flow positive" and you are running "a going concern."
But what if the stamping presses need to be changed because after a couple years your car "is stale" to your customers and you need to "freshen it" by changing a few curves in the car's outline? What if government emission regulations will require major engineering changes to your powertrain by 2025? How are you going to pay for that -- take out loans that require interest payments? Sell more stock to investors expecting either cash dividend payments or a level of paper "returns"?
So you don't really know what it "costs" to build the base car let alone the "options." If no customer bought the 15K options package that costs you little to add on, is your company going to "go under" in a few years for the reasons given above? So maybe the 30K base car is "sold at a loss" to the cheapskates who forgo the "extras", but it "segments your market" and maximizes revenue from your line of cars?
This is the dilemma that Tesla is in especially because they or no one else really knows what it costs to make their cars, especially when they are incurring heavy "cap-ex" spending to grow their production of cars to meet burgeoning demand. The cash coming in from all of those Model 3's rolling of their line, however, will have to pay off the large amount they owe suppliers along with some big loan payments coming due, and if they don't synchronize the march of money in the door with money going out the door, poof!, Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that 40-50 billion dollars in share holdings at around $300/share last time I checked vanishes.
But no one really knows what it "costs" to make a Tesla -- it is all accounting formulas, that is, until they stiff someone they owe a large payment and the whole thing collapses, or they squeak through and they dominate the world automotive market.
I attended a public talk by a representative of General Electric at a university. Such talks are often in connection with recruitment of graduates to work at that company.
The speaker explained warranty contracts with the airlines for jet engines that he called "power-by-the-hour." The purchase of an engine is hence not just "for an engine" but rather for a certain amount of useful life out of the engine under specified operating conditions.
The speaker further explained the concept of a "power rating" of a jet engine, stating that "the pilot doesn't get to do just anything with the throttle levers." It was explained that a key wear and maintenance item in an engine is the first row of turbine blades exposed to the most heat, and the maximum power used on takeoff exposes them to heat that expands them to wear against their casing. A specified "rating" instructs the pilot to advance the throttles to no more than an upper level of a temperature gauge or RPM reading, essentially giving the amount of thrust intended to operate the particular aircraft. The same engine on a heavier version of the aircraft may be assigned a higher rating that puts more stress on the engine, but the airline pays more money to operate the engine in that service.
I interpret this to mean that in an emergency, a pilot may "firewall" the throttles to exceed the rating and void the warranty or perhaps incur contractual penalty payments to the airline, but when life and property is in danger, you don't worry about the extra expense.
It may seem like it complicates operation of an airplane that the crew needs to observe an "engine rating" and not operate the engines past the redline for the contracted service condition -- the pilot is supposed to worry about terms of a financial contract with the airline when flying the airplane? But that is the "culture" of aviation -- the pilot is trained to fly the airplane according to the handbook and manufacturers instructions but there are no governors or restrictors or limiters -- the pilot can exceed those limits if emergency conditions warrant -- like Kirk ordering Scotty to go faster when the Klingons are chasing them.
That could be the situation with Tesla, only Tesla and not the driver is enabling operation past the limit. On the other hand, it could be like the jumper on the 1970's era mainframe computer, where you paid serious money for a technician to unplug the jumper and give you a higher clock rate.
Is that the gimpy old dude in Fukuoka who can no longer grab a recessed door handle and does "tear downs" of cars and sells the report of what he finds for a lot of money?
What is the mission of the security system at Google?
What I figure it is for at Google and many other tech companies is to satisfy a legal requirement, for I.P. protection and especially to satisfy the U.S. Patent Office.
If you make a public disclosure, it sets a clock ticking for a U.S. Patent and it may prevent issuance of a patent in other countries. If you make a confidential disclosure, you are protected against tripping that clock, but how do you guarantee that when you are talking to other Google employees you are making a confidential disclosure? It appears that two conditions establish a "safe harbor" on legal confidential disclosure -- that the employees you are talking to have all signed the corporate patent agreement and that there are locks on the doors and guards at the entrance to the facility.
So Google doesn't need Minuteman Missile Base level of security, it only needs to go through the motions of security to satisfy the lawyers. However hackable their door locks were, they were satisfying the legal requirement, that is, until Genius Google Employee hacked them. Now that this vulnerability has been disclosed, Google has to rework their door locks as does every other fine user of that particular door system.
110010001000 spent 60 grand -- there are Tesla Model 3 configurations you can get for that amount.
But maybe the person posting that drives a 15 year old Honda Civic when not taking the city bus or walking and is having fun at the expense of people who think that a car is that labor and mineral resource intensive that it costs 60 grand is going to Save the Earth.
offered the advice that Tesla should "water down" current shares by selling more stock now rather than when Tesla is in a financial crisis. The "FUD" they are "spreading" is to ask why Tesla isn't doing this sensible thing. No, people would not be screaming -- the share price and demand for the stock would support this, so why isn't Tesla doing it?.
In the notorious case of the death of a child in Boulder Colorado named Jon Benet Ramsey, a putative hostage ransom note had those three exclamation points in it.
Many people interested in the case are of the mind that the note was not written by terrorist kidnappers, rather, it was written by the mom to cover up the death of her daughter at her hands -- probably in a fit-of-range in administering abusive parental discipline. Certainly, a terrorist kidnapper would not use so many tropes and memes of upper-middle class suburban American culture in describing who they are and what they want. "A group of individuals" is how the American upper-middle class talks, not a member of a foreign terrorist group. The exclamation points are also consistent with the mom Patsy Ramsey being a control freak.
The note in its entirety is out on the Web. The overuse of exclamation points reminds me about the stylistic tics permeating American life that are in that note.
I only see LOL used as an expression of contempt, mainly where controversial opinions are being expressed. Its use is reminiscent of the regard the soldiers at the French castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail had for Arthur and his quest.
In that context, I find its use rather annoying and downright childish. It is a credit to the Slashdot community that we can disagree with each other without any LOLs.
In addition to the sprinkling of exclamation points and LOLs, I would also like to see the use of "But, wait!" retired. It goes something like, "Reagan was going to end wasteful government spending and never negotiate for the release of hostages . . . but wait!"
There was a time when "but wait!" was a clever put-down of someone you were arguing with online, but we see, we've heard and long get the idea and the sheer repetition of this once original rhetorical device is also annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
ever come up for air?
Didn't these other guys (Eberhard? Straubel? Maybe Tarpenning?) found Tesla, or at least the started some kind of electric car company is a garage before Musk came along?
At the very least, Musk is the Jobs and some other dudes or dudettes are the Woz of Tesla? But hasn't Musk glommed on to the limelight; is he the Stalin of Tesla?
There must be a lot of really smart people at Tesla and SpaceX, but I guess Elon Musk is the public face and the "visionary." I am getting to think that Tesla needs to move on from Tesla, and I am told that is already the case at SpaceX with Gwynne Shotwell running that place?
A board of directors is the Capitalist version of the Politburo, or the Politburo in a Communist government is like a corporate board of directors.
Actually, there is the Central Committee to which the Politburo reports, but you get the idea.
In a political democracy, which neither a Communist government or a Capitalist corporation are, you don't have such a thing, but you have various checks-and-balances such as an independent judiciary or a bicameral (two-house) legislature or three-branch legislature-executive-judicial system.
A family member served on the board of directors of a shopping mall. The board hired a mall manager who had a more-than-full-time job actually running the place, but the board would meet once a month to discuss "how the mall was doing" -- were there rental vacancies or did new tenants replace the ones who left or were kicked out? Is the nail salon underreporting their income and underpaying the profit-based portion of their rent?
I too wonder about having the CEO also serve as Chairman-of-the-Board. In Catholic parishes, the parish priest typically serves as Chairman of the Parish Council whereas is Protestant churches, the pastor is regarded more as a church employee rather than having special status under Apostolic Succession? Protestant churches can hire and fire their pastor whereas a Catholic parish pretty much has to work with the priest assigned to them by the bishop? So how much independence does a Catholic Parish Council have with the priest sitting right there and what Catholic-in-good-enough-standing-to-get-elected-to-Council is going to disrespect their priest?
I also wondered how the Politburo functioned under Stalin -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- members of this Communist version of a Board of Directors starting ending up dead when they disagreed?
So even corporate boards can have varying degrees of independence or lack thereof from the guy-in-charge? So let's just hope the new Tesla board members stay healthy?
What does unfit for military service even mean? This sounds like some excuse offered to a draft board to get excused?
"Sir, I am unable to do 5 chin-ups/pull-ups/whatever-kind-of-qualifying-callisthenic-to-qualify-for-military-service." "Too bad, son, you will have to stay home and wallow in shame to not be at the front with your friends, living out your natural lifespan with your limbs intact."
Do I need to run the dryer at 5 PM? No, but what if I run it at 7 PM?
The time-of-day plans I have seen offered by the local power company would require you to run it after 11 PM. I have seen no cost benefit to switching to a time-of-day plan without radical, not minor, lifestyle changes.
Is my power company not sincere of wanting people to switch? Do they think some customers will switch because they cannot do simple calculations? Or are the lifestyle changes to make a meaningful difference with respect to the mismatch between solar and when electricity demanded deeper than simply postponing running your dryer a couple hours into the evening?
The Golden Rule of marketing is to price a good or a service at what each individual customers is willing to pay, and yes, the "options racket" is a way of charging customers different amounts for nearly the same thing.
The airlines have gone into this in a big way, not only with the system for offering cheaper tickets for advanced purchase, inconvenient times, or having to change in Atlanta, but also the upgrade fees for checked bags, extra legroom, or being the first person to exit the plane in case it catches fire after landing.
Oracle is moving towards segmenting the market for the Java JDK/JRE, where it remains free if you are on the treadmill to use only the latest version with security updates (and no more 32-bit X86 either), otherwise you pay. And there are no posted prices as you are supposed to call Oracle to be asked, "How much are you willing to spend?"
You could say that the 15K for the basket of options is "pure profit", but how do you know that the 30K for the baseline car is offering the car "at cost"? Running a car company, you basically are paying salaries, hourly wages, fringes and money to suppliers of parts, your factory and insurance utilities, and then you have money coming in from the sale of cars along with income streams from your captive leasing and financing subsidiary for customers not paying in cash up front. If the money coming in exceeds the money going out, you are "cash flow positive" and you are running "a going concern."
But what if the stamping presses need to be changed because after a couple years your car "is stale" to your customers and you need to "freshen it" by changing a few curves in the car's outline? What if government emission regulations will require major engineering changes to your powertrain by 2025? How are you going to pay for that -- take out loans that require interest payments? Sell more stock to investors expecting either cash dividend payments or a level of paper "returns"?
So you don't really know what it "costs" to build the base car let alone the "options." If no customer bought the 15K options package that costs you little to add on, is your company going to "go under" in a few years for the reasons given above? So maybe the 30K base car is "sold at a loss" to the cheapskates who forgo the "extras", but it "segments your market" and maximizes revenue from your line of cars?
This is the dilemma that Tesla is in especially because they or no one else really knows what it costs to make their cars, especially when they are incurring heavy "cap-ex" spending to grow their production of cars to meet burgeoning demand. The cash coming in from all of those Model 3's rolling of their line, however, will have to pay off the large amount they owe suppliers along with some big loan payments coming due, and if they don't synchronize the march of money in the door with money going out the door, poof!, Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that 40-50 billion dollars in share holdings at around $300/share last time I checked vanishes.
But no one really knows what it "costs" to make a Tesla -- it is all accounting formulas, that is, until they stiff someone they owe a large payment and the whole thing collapses, or they squeak through and they dominate the world automotive market.
I attended a public talk by a representative of General Electric at a university. Such talks are often in connection with recruitment of graduates to work at that company.
The speaker explained warranty contracts with the airlines for jet engines that he called "power-by-the-hour." The purchase of an engine is hence not just "for an engine" but rather for a certain amount of useful life out of the engine under specified operating conditions.
The speaker further explained the concept of a "power rating" of a jet engine, stating that "the pilot doesn't get to do just anything with the throttle levers." It was explained that a key wear and maintenance item in an engine is the first row of turbine blades exposed to the most heat, and the maximum power used on takeoff exposes them to heat that expands them to wear against their casing. A specified "rating" instructs the pilot to advance the throttles to no more than an upper level of a temperature gauge or RPM reading, essentially giving the amount of thrust intended to operate the particular aircraft. The same engine on a heavier version of the aircraft may be assigned a higher rating that puts more stress on the engine, but the airline pays more money to operate the engine in that service.
I interpret this to mean that in an emergency, a pilot may "firewall" the throttles to exceed the rating and void the warranty or perhaps incur contractual penalty payments to the airline, but when life and property is in danger, you don't worry about the extra expense.
It may seem like it complicates operation of an airplane that the crew needs to observe an "engine rating" and not operate the engines past the redline for the contracted service condition -- the pilot is supposed to worry about terms of a financial contract with the airline when flying the airplane? But that is the "culture" of aviation -- the pilot is trained to fly the airplane according to the handbook and manufacturers instructions but there are no governors or restrictors or limiters -- the pilot can exceed those limits if emergency conditions warrant -- like Kirk ordering Scotty to go faster when the Klingons are chasing them.
That could be the situation with Tesla, only Tesla and not the driver is enabling operation past the limit. On the other hand, it could be like the jumper on the 1970's era mainframe computer, where you paid serious money for a technician to unplug the jumper and give you a higher clock rate.
You are talking about Sandy Munro of Bloomfield Hills, MI.
I, along with the person I was responding to, are talking about Sayonara Munuro, City of Fukuoko, Fukuoko Prefecture, Japan.
Is that the gimpy old dude in Fukuoka who can no longer grab a recessed door handle and does "tear downs" of cars and sells the report of what he finds for a lot of money?
What is the mission of the security system at Google?
What I figure it is for at Google and many other tech companies is to satisfy a legal requirement, for I.P. protection and especially to satisfy the U.S. Patent Office.
If you make a public disclosure, it sets a clock ticking for a U.S. Patent and it may prevent issuance of a patent in other countries. If you make a confidential disclosure, you are protected against tripping that clock, but how do you guarantee that when you are talking to other Google employees you are making a confidential disclosure? It appears that two conditions establish a "safe harbor" on legal confidential disclosure -- that the employees you are talking to have all signed the corporate patent agreement and that there are locks on the doors and guards at the entrance to the facility.
So Google doesn't need Minuteman Missile Base level of security, it only needs to go through the motions of security to satisfy the lawyers. However hackable their door locks were, they were satisfying the legal requirement, that is, until Genius Google Employee hacked them. Now that this vulnerability has been disclosed, Google has to rework their door locks as does every other fine user of that particular door system.
Great job, Genius Google Employee!
It is not difficult to find a cutting of the apple variety that inspired Newton.
The real problem for commercial growers, however, is that the darned thing keeps dropping its apples . . .
110010001000 spent 60 grand -- there are Tesla Model 3 configurations you can get for that amount.
But maybe the person posting that drives a 15 year old Honda Civic when not taking the city bus or walking and is having fun at the expense of people who think that a car is that labor and mineral resource intensive that it costs 60 grand is going to Save the Earth.
new to Slashdot.
First people believed that "funding (was) secured" and now people believe that a deal is being negotiated?
Bloviating? Comical?
I think you left out "cherry picking" and "spewing."
offered the advice that Tesla should "water down" current shares by selling more stock now rather than when Tesla is in a financial crisis. The "FUD" they are "spreading" is to ask why Tesla isn't doing this sensible thing. No, people would not be screaming -- the share price and demand for the stock would support this, so why isn't Tesla doing it?.
The Tesla model?
So there is something to Frank Herbert's concepts?
Or 256 tablespoons?
The attendant, supervisor or owner park one or more cars to block the pump?
that was produced in this all-hands-on-deck sprint of factory operation?
The X-15 was fueled by liquid oxygen and liquified ammonia. Jet airliners get their oxidizer from the air, but they can be fueled by ammonia.
Yes, there is hazard with it, but liquified anhydrous ammonia is widely used in farming as nitrogen fertilizer.
In the notorious case of the death of a child in Boulder Colorado named Jon Benet Ramsey, a putative hostage ransom note had those three exclamation points in it.
Many people interested in the case are of the mind that the note was not written by terrorist kidnappers, rather, it was written by the mom to cover up the death of her daughter at her hands -- probably in a fit-of-range in administering abusive parental discipline. Certainly, a terrorist kidnapper would not use so many tropes and memes of upper-middle class suburban American culture in describing who they are and what they want. "A group of individuals" is how the American upper-middle class talks, not a member of a foreign terrorist group. The exclamation points are also consistent with the mom Patsy Ramsey being a control freak.
The note in its entirety is out on the Web. The overuse of exclamation points reminds me about the stylistic tics permeating American life that are in that note.
Depending on where a person got their degree, yes.
and your father smelled of elderberries."
I only see LOL used as an expression of contempt, mainly where controversial opinions are being expressed. Its use is reminiscent of the regard the soldiers at the French castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail had for Arthur and his quest.
In that context, I find its use rather annoying and downright childish. It is a credit to the Slashdot community that we can disagree with each other without any LOLs.
In addition to the sprinkling of exclamation points and LOLs, I would also like to see the use of "But, wait!" retired. It goes something like, "Reagan was going to end wasteful government spending and never negotiate for the release of hostages . . . but wait!"
There was a time when "but wait!" was a clever put-down of someone you were arguing with online, but we see, we've heard and long get the idea and the sheer repetition of this once original rhetorical device is also annoying.